Ashley Jones

Ashley M. Jones received an MFA in Poetry from Florida International University (FIU), where she was a John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Fellow. She served as Official Poet for the City of Sunrise, Florida’s Little Free Libraries Initiative from 2013-2015, and her work was recognized in the 2014 Poets and Writers Maureen Egen Writer’s Exchange Contest and the 2015 Academy of American Poets Contest at FIU. She was also a finalist in the 2015 Hub City Press New Southern Voices Contest, the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award Contest, and the National Poetry Series. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in The Academy of American Poets, Prelude, Steel Toe Review, Night Owl, The Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy, pluck!, Valley Voices: New York School Edition, Fjords Review: Black American Edition, PMSPoemMemoirStory, Kinfolks Quarterly, Lucid Moose Press’ Like a Girl: Perspectives on Femininity Anthology and others. She received a 2015 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award and a 2015 B-Metro Magazine Fusion Award. Her debut poetry collection, Magic City Gospel, is forthcoming from Hub City Press in January 2017. She serves as an editor of PANK Magazine, and she currently lives in Birmingham, Alabama, where she is a faculty member in the Creative Writing Department of the Alabama School of Fine Arts.

In two poems, Ashley M. Jones gives us absence and excess, the flesh (hands) made into object (whips) the body objectified, the strange juxtapositions that have made America “almost independent” on its two hundred and fortieth year. She pulls no punches but insists on invoking the violence, implicit […]

America, almost independent for its two hundred fortieth year, is an interstate highway in Birmingham, where I’m speeding back to my parents’ house, where the roads are clear because God blessed America, or maybe it’s just because there is beer and tiny explosions in every backyard, campy novelty […]